


B-Sides

by notbecauseofvictories



Series: The Devil Went Down to Georgia (And Then Went Down on Johnny) [2]
Category: Devil Went Down to Georgia (Song)
Genre: Biblical References, Body Horror, Body Worship, Established Relationship, Jealousy, M/M, Masturbation, Religion, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-01 09:49:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16762738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbecauseofvictories/pseuds/notbecauseofvictories
Summary: All the tunes that didn't make the cut.





	B-Sides

**Author's Note:**

> This is technically the first draft, before I decided to scrap it for being wildly tone- and character-inconsistent. Still, it was already written and fairly lengthy to boot, so there's really no harm in sharing it as a fun extra.
> 
> Enjoy!

  
  


Johnny shuts his eyes when he kisses the Devil.

It’s nothing personal, just—a few too many times he’s touched his tongue to the Devil’s lower lip and tasted something waxy, bitter as cheap coffee grounds; let his hand trail down the Devil’s back and had the Devil’s spine turn into the ridges of scales under his palm. Fingertips brushing feathers, or flies’ wings, or bone, instead of skin. Once, he put his hand to the Devil’s neck, and it _burned_ —like Johnny was palming a thing of solid fire, and he’d jerked his hand away on instinct, cursing.

He’s always known the Devil was something else, something not human, and Johnny doesn’t mind kissing that thing. He just also doesn’t want to see it shift and change under his hands. Suspects he might go crazy trying, his eyes burned blind like St. Paul’s on the road.

“Stop that,” Johnny mutters once, tangling his fingers in the Devil’s hair only for his hand to sink to the wrist into something thick and cold—like a knot of rushes in the water, maybe, or melting snow, but trembling. (Somewhere in Johnny’s head is a list of all the things the Devil is like, he keeps adding to it: snake, bird, snow, rain. Blues. Johnny thinks in some odd way it’s inscribing him, the way you search for something lost—he’ll end up finding the Devil in the last place he looks.)

“Come on,” Johnny mumbles. The Devil’s jaw seems solid enough under Johnny’s mouth, but there’s still that strange snow-melt wetness curling around his fingers. “Stay in one shape.”

“You’re distracting me,” the Devil says, a sibilant hiss to his voice; the emphasis skipping letters and settling on _disss_ tracted, just enough that it makes Johnny grin, even with his eyes shut.

He feels the air shift when the Devil huffs, a breath against Johnny’s cheek. There’s a cold-burning spark that trails, deliberately, down Johnny’s spine, a tease of a feeling—Johnny’s response is an outraged sound, and to dig his fingers into that cold, snow-melt _thing_.

The Devil makes one of those high, decidedly non-human noises. Johnny grins even wider.

“Like I said,” the Devil murmurs after a moment, sounding breathless. “You’re distracting me.”

Johnny tries that again, when he puts his hand on the Devil’s thigh and instead finds himself palming something unyielding, frozen—later he’ll add _metallic_ , because that’s what his fingers smell like afterwards, exhaust and aluminum. But Johnny’s lost in the sensation himself so he just hums, and scrapes a thumbnail across the hard surface.

The Devil makes a sound Johnny’s never heard before. Partly like he’s trying to swallow his own tongue and also singing through gritted teeth, and maybe something else, lower and harsh as the scrape of metal on metal. It makes Johnny shiver and break out in a cold-sweat, every bit of his skin suddenly alive and trembling.

(The Devil doesn’t even have enough breath to tell him to stop grinning, after.)

Johnny can’t get that out of his head, afterward. Not the—well, that too, but mostly the way the Devil had said _distracted_ , _you’re distracting me._ Johnny’s not bad-looking, he knows, he’s got his mama’s eyes and a body that does what he asks of it; an old flame called him ‘striking’ once. He can wrench noises out of the Devil that aren’t human or even close to it, like he’s coming apart in places Johnny can’t see.

But Johnny’s never thought of himself as distracting as all that, enough to make the Devil forget his skin entirely.

He lays in bed that night thinking about it. What it’d mean, to distract the Devil enough that he forgot the linen suit and even the flesh beneath—for Johnny to be suddenly cradling a thing of metal and snake-skin scales, or maybe a bird, heavy wings around them like a bower. A tangle of wet rushes in a divine river, cool as rain. A thing that wasn’t human or even close to one, touching Johnny out of alien fascination and the desire to cradle humanity in its hands.

Maybe it didn’t have hands. Gram had always liked Ezekiel— _words of lament and warning and woe_ —and Ezekiel’s angels didn’t have hands. Four eyes and four wings, huge sparking wheels made of blue stone, but no hands. It’s strange to think about, when the Devil’s hands are there in Johnny’s head, the memory of them etched on his skin.

But then he’s not sure the Devil’s an angel at all, or anymore.

Johnny doesn’t even know his dick is paying attention until he shifts a bit and it _throbs_ , in time with his heartbeat. Johnny lets out a shuddering breath.

If he were with anyone else, Johnny would say they hadn’t done anything his youth pastor would disapprove of. As it is, Johnny’s gone ahead and succumbed to the Devil’s wiles, snares, wickedness, mouth, smile, tongue, clutches, and hands all at once. Pastor Emanuel probably wouldn’t approve just because the Devil and Johnny don’t know each other in a strictly Biblical sense.

(The Devil laughed, when Johnny referred to it that way. _I’ve read the book in question_ , he says, _there’s not much to recommend it on that subject_.)

But it still means that Johnny’s alone, here in his bed.

He lets his eyes flutter shut, and imagines what it’d be like—the Devil likes to look at him, Johnny knows, so let him look. Let him watch as Johnny curls a hand around his dick, gives it a couple slow pumps. Johnny imagines looking up the Devil through his eyelashes, watching him watch Johnny. Watching him get _distracted._

He wonders how long it’d take. The eyes first—old glass warming to poison yellow. The Devil in Johnny’s imagination blinks, and they’re slitted, flat snake-eyes. (Those always go first, any time the Devil isn’t concentrating; sometimes Johnny can get them to change just by putting his hand on the Devil’s neck, smiling too long, standing too close.)

The mouth next. The Devil wets his lower lip with a forked tongue and breathes in sharply as Johnny’s heart picks up. _‘Johnny,'_ the Devil says, and he sounds unsteady. ‘ _Y_ _ou best be sure. You ought to know what it is you’re doing._

“I never know what it is I’m doing,” Johnny whispers, letting his head loll back against the pillow. He can feel his blood heating up with every stroke of his hand. “I haven’t let that stop me yet.”

He’s not sure what would go next, the skin maybe. All that pale skin—the Devil doesn’t leave much unguarded but his throat, his hands—shivering, skipping like a tracking VCR, and hardening into scales. Or maybe it’s the horns next, the Devil ducking his head into shadow and straightening up with those ugly, twisting bones protruding from his forehead.

(The Devil saying, ‘ _Johnny,_ ’ in warning, like Johnny could be warned off now.)

Any way, Johnny’s very clear what happens next: the Devil strides over to Johnny’s bed or sometimes is just there, already. He’s there. Bending over Johnny so that that long white hair falls over his forehead and breathing, ‘ _Shut your eyes. Shut your eyes for me._ ’

Johnny does. He imagines it would be like shutting your eyes against the sun, the way the light still filtered through—the Devil is all-white, in his imagination, a burning flame. But he still shuts his eyes and pumps his hand furiously, trying to imagine what happens next. Trying to conjure up that thing of metal wheels and river rushes as it touched him. As it ran hands that weren’t hands over Johnny’s hips, his thighs.

The cool rain-touch of it, when it hesitantly, reached out and grasped his dick.

“I’m not made of glass,” Johnny whispers, and he can practically feel the Devil’s smile. He imagines that mouth kissing his skin, up to his ear.

‘ _Y_ _es,’_ the Devil murmurs against the shell of his ear. _‘You are. Fragile as glass...’_

Johnny’s hand is moving faster now, too fast for him to keep hold of more than—the thought of pressure there, cool not-hands, not mouths; the smell of exhaust and a brush of feathers. A pennies and cigarettes taste at the back of his throat. Mostly him imagines the Devil’s eyes, slitted and yellow and fixed on him, watching him come apart. He imagines the Devil leaning in at the last, close enough that Johnny can feel it when he breathes into Johnny’s mouth—

“Johnny.”

Johnny’s eyes slam open and the Devil is there, he’s _there_ , shedding cold and staring down at Johnny with eyes like twin sparks, and it’s all too much—Johnny barely has time to make a choked-off sound before he’s coming, his body damn near arcing off the bed.

It takes a minute, more than a minute, for him to come back to himself afterwards. Johnny’s breathing is still stuttering, labored; somehow his hand has ended up at the nape of the Devil’s neck, with his fingers fisted in that ash-white hair. He’s dragged the Devil in, his face very close, almost enough to kiss.

Johnny blinks, and eases his hand off the Devil’s neck. “Uh.” He clears his throat. “Hey. I was just thinking about you.”

The Devil is crouched over Johnny, blinding white even in the dark of Johnny’s bedroom. He swallows up everything in Johnny’s sight, though at the corners of his eyes Johnny can see things moving, shifting, in a way that no earthly thing ought to—shadows and sparking wheels of blue stone, maybe, or wings, or the coils of a snake. Johnny could turn his head and see, but that would mean looking away from the Devil’s face, the naked hunger there. ( _I was right,_ Johnny thinks dizzily, _you can’t look at this straight-on and not go crazy._ )

“You called for me,” the Devil says. His voice scrapes like a bow over badly tuned strings.

“Did I?” Johnny asks. He’s pretty sure he didn’t—he went through puberty in his mama’s house, he learned to keep quiet—but whatever the Devil needs to tell himself. Or maybe all you need to do is summon Satan is think about him with your hand on your cock.

“Johnny,” the Devil says again, and his voice is lower, softer, humming with a strange note that makes Johnny shiver and his pulse pick up again, pounding at his throat. The Devil’s eyes aren’t yellow at all this time—they’re too bright, almost white. “Johnny, shut your eyes.”

“You sure?” Johnny asks, and the Devil says, “Yes.”

“Because you have to be sure,” Johnny says, “I wouldn’t want anyone to think I took advantage.”

The Devil huffs, and something that doesn’t feel like hands—especially because Johnny can see the Devil’s hands, planted on either side of his head—wraps itself around Johnny’s wrists, pinning them to the bed. But Johnny doesn’t look away, caught by the Devil’s eyes. The white brightness of them is edging into blue, like a hot flame getting hotter. “I am certain,” the Devil says. “Shut your eyes for me, Johnny.”

“I’m just asking, because—”

“Johnny. Be quiet.”

Johnny grins, and shuts his eyes.

.

.

.

Johnny doesn’t get hickeys anymore, at least not that he can see. Instead, he hears the clatter of bells anytime he passes an unmarked grave, and saying ‘wander’ fills his mouth up with the taste of something like cherry coke, but thicker, and spicy. Sometimes, when he’s lying in bed and almost-asleep, teetering on the very edge of it, he can press down on the tender places left by the Devil’s mouth and the whole room will fall away until he’s lying beneath a harvest moon, the brightness of it swallowing up the stars.

(He wonders you can still call them prophetic visions if it’s the Devil at the other end.)

“Did you get a tattoo, man?” Hubby asks once after a gig, squinting at Johnny’s neck. “I can’t tell what it is, looks sort of like initials.”

Johnny forces a laugh, dismisses it with something about how no parent would trust him if he ever showed up to violin lessons with ink he couldn’t hide under a starched collar. Ignores how, under Hubby’s stare, the bruise left there by the Devil burns.

When he gets home, Johnny locks himself in the bathroom, craning his neck to stare at himself in the mirror. It’s not a bruise—Hubby was right, it does look sort of like initials. Foreign squiggles, and a thing that might be a snake biting its own tail. Maybe a bolt of lightning drawn through it.

Johnny presses on it lightly with his fingertips, and has to swallow against a sharp stab of longing; his ears are suddenly full of radio static and his own heartbeat.

It takes him a minute more to realize where he’s seen the mark before.

“I’m not a bottle of whiskey,” Johnny says, the next time he sees the Devil. The Devil only blinks, and then his gaze slides down, to where the mark still bruises Johnny’s skin. He doesn’t touch it, but a shiver goes through Johnny all the same.

“And that is not a whiskey label,” the Devil answers calmly enough. His eyes are yellow, hungry. “It’s my name.”

Johnny huffs. “What, you just scrawl ‘the Devil’ over everything?”

“What’s mine, yes.”

Johnny blinks. Opens his mouth, and then—shuts it again.

“It suits you,” the Devil says into the silence. He turns away, gazing into a nearby store window with studied indifference, and Johnny has to swallow an undignified noise. He almost makes it anyway when the Devil adds: “I could give you a necklace of them, ear to ear.”

“That’d be hard to explain,” Johnny says weakly. He caught all kinds of hell when he turned up with hickeys in high school, he can’t imagine what his mama would say if he showed at Sunday dinner with a collar of strange, squiggly tattoos.

“They do fade, eventually.” The Devil glances at him sideways, and the corner of his mouth curls. “Still. It’d look good.”

.

.

.

“Holy shit,” Johnny sighs, because the Devil’s kissing a line down his throat and it’s like water moving impossibly slowly down his neck—the touch of the Devil’s mouth liquid, sinking in through Johnny’s skin and taking up residence in his blood. He’s drunk with it, the divine pleasure of having this. As though having the Devil there, cool and gentle as rain, wasn’t proof enough of God.

He lets his head loll back. “Jesus _Christ_ , yeah, that’s—”

It happens too fast, and suddenly the Devil’s grabbing Johnny by the nape of his neck and yanking his head up. “No,” the Devil snarls. His eyes are slitted and poison-yellow; glowing faintly with that hard, predatory light.

Johnny’s heart is beating jackrabbit-fast, and he wonders for a delirious moment if he’s about to get eaten. He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t considered that a possibility, what with the snake’s eyes and scales and how the Devil looks at him sometimes, like kissing is nice, but swallowing Johnny whole would be more efficient. (Johnny tries to figure out if he minds, but his heart’s beating too hard in his throat just now, he can’t think anything.)

The Devil only looks at him, though, eyes glittering. Finally, dizzy, Johnny remembers to breathe.

“Do you understand?” the Devil asks as Johnny takes a desperate gulp of air. “No one else. No other names. Not His, not—not anyone’s but mine. Nod.”

Johnny exhales, and nods.

The Devil looks at him, unblinking, for another too-long while. He only hesitates slightly before leaning in to kiss Johnny again. It tastes bitter, coffee grounds and licking pennies, but Johnny lets him. Shuts his eyes like he always does and kisses the Devil back—even puts his hand at the Devil’s jaw (it gives, slippery, under his fingers) to show that he understands.

Then pretends, days after, that he isn’t still thinking about it. The Devil’s fingernails digging into his neck like talons, and his mouth, so close to Johnny’s mouth. Underneath the terror, a cruel kind-of-something predatory he felt in answer, some violent joy and the urge to demand the same in turn: _no one’s name but mine_.

But Johnny’s not sure whether you can ask the Devil for fidelity, even with the bloody marks of his talons at your neck.

After a few weeks, the nail marks at the base of Johnny’s skull scab over and itch, and then they’re gone. He tries not to think about it after that.

.

.

.

For some reason, Johnny had thought that the Devil would stop _looking_ at him, once some of the novelty wore away. Or maybe he just assumed that—now that the Devil could touch him, could map the contours of Johnny’s shape with his fingertips, and the line of Johnny’s mouth with his mouth, he wouldn’t be so interested in staring.

Instead, the Devil seems to have taken it as an invitation to look his fill, without pretense or shame.

Johnny probably wouldn’t have minded or even noticed, except he can feel when the Devil’s eyes are on him; the lightest rasp of something dry and cold—like fork tines, or scales—across his skin. (Johnny never thought of himself as the jealous type, but he likes the scrape of the Devil’s stare. Even just for that second, the Devil is his, belongs to no other.) Other times the Devil’s gaze dips lower, that same cold slithering beneath Johnny’s collar, under his shirt. Curling up there, seemingly contented, as Johnny struggles to have an intelligible conversation.

Only now, when Johnny lifts his head and catches him looking, the Devil doesn’t look away, doesn’t even have the decency to act caught-out. Instead, more often than not, he just cocks his head and _smirks_.

Johnny’s glad he’s not any lighter-skinned; he’d be wandering around red and blotchy as Carl for blushing. “You’re going to kill me,” he breathes as the Devil’s thumb digs into the soft skin at the crook of his arm. Johnny’s tugging at the collar of the Devil’s starched shirt, trying to get him closer. (He could swallow the Devil whole too.)

“Beautiful,” the Devil murmurs back, Johnny’s not sure whether he means Johnny or Johnny’s death but he still lets Johnny kiss him, and press him up against the wall in the alley behind the bar. Johnny gets back in time for the rest of the band’s set, but he’s distracted; can feel the Devil’s eyes lingering on him even as he plays out ‘Red Haired Boy.’

Johnny has to duck his head as Ava tells the audience where they can download the band’s music; he’s pretty sure his expression gives him away.

“Like what you see?” Johnny asks once, grinning. They’ve got a formal gig that evening and the Devil is suddenly—inexplicably, as much as the Devil ever needs explanation—lounging on Johnny’s bed, watching Johnny knot his tie.

Johnny keeps catching sight of the Devil’s face in the mirror, and it turns his fingers to fumbling lead each time.

“I always like to look at you,” the Devil says. “You know that.”

“It’s just the one, human shape,” Johnny says, pretending that he hasn’t dropped the knot for a third time. (No one should look at him like that. No one should look at _anyone_ like that. The world would grind to a halt, if people went around staring at each other like the ordinary act of adjusting a tie were some arcane and vital ritual, as miraculous as turning water to wine.)

He looks down to straighten out his tie, and when he looks up again the Devil’s there, pale and grave and standing in front of him. Johnny blinks.

“Yes,” the Devil says, and Johnny raises his eyebrows. “I mean that you are correct, it is one human shape.”

Johnny stopped flinching when the Devil reached for him a long time ago, but he still has to tell himself to be very still under those hands.

“But here,” the Devil says, his fingertips hovering just over Johnny’s collarbone. Johnny’s close enough to see the Devil’s eyes are pale yellow, his pupils slitted. “I remember when your ancestors evolved this bone, and these muscles. A hundred hundred years, and a hundred hundred more...we watched you. Millennia of watching you swim and crawl in the mud—and then suddenly, you could look up. The first miracle.

“That was all you wanted to do for a century or so,” the Devil says quietly. His hands are still hovering over Johnny’s skin, but Johnny can feel them all the same; burning like a flame outside his body. “You were such small things, small and wet and staring at the sky.”

“I—” Johnny breathes, but the Devil ignores him.

“Your wrists,” the Devil says instead, his hands skimming Johnny’s shoulders, down, down to Johnny’s arms and the sharp knobs his elbows, then where flesh gives in to bone. “Cain threw a rock at Abel, you know, and it struck him—” Johnny makes a choked-off noise when the Devil reaches up and palms the back of Johnny’s head. “There. He died of it, and their mother cried for days. I could tell you every muscle and tiny bone in his wrist that meant that boy could throw a stone hard enough to knock his brother’s brain out. The history of that first murder, written in your skin.”

With his hand on the nape of Johnny’s neck, the Devil is very close. His breath smells of something unfamiliar—chemical and almost alien, like hairspray. Johnny’s nose burns as he breathes it in.

“But my favorite is this,” the Devil says, and Johnny jolts when the Devil digs his fingers into Johnny’s hips. They’re cold, even through Johnny’s slacks. “A couple minor genetic mutations in your homeotic genes, completely harmless, hardly worth mentioning. But it means the crest of right hipbone is slightly higher than your left. It changes your gait a little, that’s all.”

“Why is—why’s that your favorite, then?” Johnny breathes.

The Devil smiles, very slightly. “Of all your parts, all the many histories inscribed there on your red insides…that one is only yours.”

“Oh,” Johnny begins, and then can’t remember how he planned on finishing. He’s looking at the Devil’s mouth now, and thinking about kissing him. Thinking about his red insides, and being swallowed whole. (If the Devil’s hands go any lower, he will not be held accountable for his actions. He’s been reduced to a thing of warm honey and desire, all of him, every bit. If the Devil’s hands go any lower—)

“I am loath to give the Old Man credit for much of anything,” the Devil says, so quietly that Johnny can barely hear him over the sound of their mingled breathing. Out of the of his eye, there’s something moving—too big for the room and yet impossibly still in here with him, like the throb of a bass speaker. The impression of music not-quite-heard but alive in the air.

“Johnny,” the Devil says softly, and Johnny swallows, meets his gaze again. “In this, I’ll give Him credit. You are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made. I know full well.”

Johnny doesn’t mind, when the Devil’s mouth turns to marble and then to ash as Johnny kisses him.

.

.

.

Johnny dreams of a thing he doesn’t have words for, in a place he can’t describe, except that it is very bright and terrible and at once intimately familiar, beloved. Afterwards—if there were anyone he could talk to about this shit, afterwards or otherwise—he would say, _there weren’t hills but there were, and there were no houses but there were houses, all of them standing empty and ready along a glass street that wasn’t a street at all._

_It led me through them,_ he would add, _the hills and the houses, along the glass street. It led me to the edge of the world. A light that was a star, and it loved me._

At the time, he just wakes up sobbing and clawing at his chest. He wants to dig his own heart out, to somehow stop feeling—too much, everything. ( _It felt,_ he’d tell that person, _it felt like I was dying, but if it ended, if I stopped, I would forget that place, I wouldn’t remember the way back._ )

It’s the Devil who gently pries Johnny’s hands away, taking them and pressing them against the mattress. Johnny struggles against him for a moment, but the Devil is the weight of the world and straddling Johnny’s hips; it’s like trying to push back against a mountainside. Eventually, Johnny gives up and lets his head back, panting for breath and letting out awkward, choking sobs between.

He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to remember it, trying to forget, trying to—trying to—trying—

“All right,” Johnny finally says. He’s still crying, can feel his eyes burning with it, but his voice at least, is steady. “It’s okay. You can let go now, it’s fine. I’m fine.”

The Devil’s hands are cold when they leave his wrists and come up to cradle Johnny’s face. There’s a beat, then Johnny feels a cool brush of skin—the Devil, wiping away his tears. There’s only the barest scrape of scales, at the base of the Devil’s thumb.

The Devil leans in, and kisses his forehead, then his right temple. Johnny wishes he could stop trembling, wishes he could open his eyes and smile, kiss the Devil’s mouth and laugh at this, at himself, but he doesn’t feel like laughing.

The Devil kisses his temple again, then strokes the place with his fingers. “Hello Johnny,” the Devil whispers. Kisses his temple again. “Hello.”

“Hey,” Johnny says hoarsely. Breathes in, breathes out again. Opens his eyes.

“Sorry,” Johnny says. He’s sure he looks a mess, snot and tears and the Devil’s still stroking his cheek with the back of his knuckles. “Sorry, that was…I don’t know what that was.”

“It’s probably different than I remember it,” the Devil says quietly. The cool touch of his hand is comforting. “Lights on in the houses, people sleeping in the hills...It’s been a while since I went home.”

“Went—” and Johnny stops.

The Devil is watching him, twin sparks set in the shadows of his eyes. Johnny thinks of the brightness that was a star, how it had burned to be near it. There had been a...moment where they came to the edge of the glass road, and the brightness had reached for him. Johnny had reached back, and everything, all of him, had been plunged into the heart of the fire that lit all other fires.

He had burned, and burned, and burned, but even that. Even burning was joy.

(Snake, bird, blues—star. _Look at that,_ Johnny thinks, _found you in_ _the last place I looked._ )

“You ever going to show me your current place of residence, then?” Johnny asks, and the Devil laughs, a tension Johnny hadn’t noticed before ebbing out of his shoulders. He’s not a mountain suddenly, and when he fits himself to Johnny’s side, his skin is almost warm where brushes against Johnny’s shoulder, neck. He still smells alien, unpleasantly chemical, and Johnny breathes the smell of him in gratefully. A star, burning itself out in the crook of Johnny’s arm.

After a moment, there’s a rustling noise, and something heavy with feathers settles over Johnny’s legs.

Johnny’s halfway back to sleep again when the Devil murmurs, “I don’t think I’ll ever see you in my house. Johnny. Where you’re going, I cannot follow, and where I go...”

Johnny waits, keeping his breathing deep and even, but the Devil never finishes. Just turns over, and goes to sleep.

.

.

.

It’s spring, and Johnny wakes up on the couch to find the Devil there too, sitting on the floor beside him. He looks like a thing carved of marble, some Renaissance statute improbably cross-legged on Johnny’s balding carpet. The Devil’s eyes are shut and he’s singing, tunelessly and softly to himself, his head resting against Johnny’s thigh.

“You weren’t there before,” Johnny says. He tugs at a strand of the Devil’s too-white hair. In the light through the blinds, it looks almost gold. “You let yourself in?”

The Devil doesn’t lift his head, just goes on singing.

Johnny looks back up at the ceiling. He’s not sure how long he spends like that, carding his fingers through the Devil’s hair and listening to the dissonantly tuneless tune wander between keys and tempos. The room smells like—apples, actually; sweet fruit and greenery and the washed-clean smell of after rain. The afternoon light slides across the ceiling like poured honey, which could mean three hours or three days for all Johnny cares in that minute.

After a while, they’ll get up, and Johnny will feed the Devil a browning apple and some old raisins because that’s all that’s in the kitchen. The Devil will eat them anyway and claim they’re delicious, sweet, so Johnny will have to kiss him. Just to be sure.

“You’re right,” Johnny will say, even as the taste of copper and too-soft apple curdles on his tongue, and in the gold of afternoon sunlight, even the Devil will smile.

  
  
  



End file.
